


who run the world

by gatsbyparty



Series: Elysiumstuck [5]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Explicit Language, Fantastic Racism, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-28
Updated: 2012-12-28
Packaged: 2017-11-22 17:21:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/612311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatsbyparty/pseuds/gatsbyparty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Humans are so racist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	who run the world

“You look lost!” Terezi Pyrope says brightly to the liberti boy outside of Lilyat’s. “I greatly doubt you have a purpose that would require one as small as yourself to charge headfirst into a whorehouse.”  
  
The boy swears and jerks his head forward, like that’s going to snap his forehead free of her grip. She shifts her hand a little, poking her claws into the thinner skin below his fins. He yowls, snapping his jaw shut, and moves like he’s trying to headbutt her.  
  
“You miserable little beast,” she says, delighted, crouching but keeping her elbow locked with the boy at distance. “Who is your patron? Where are you from? Shall I take you to a registrar and embarass your entire lineage with my country ways? Speak up, grubling!”  
  
“I’m not a grub!” the boy shrieks, provoked into speaking. Highblood children are so easy to aggravate, especially the ones with the tiny fins. He can’t be more than three or four.  
  
“Well?”  
  
“Delmus Ishaan,” Delmus Ishaan snarls. “Lord Ampora has business with Lilyat Jovita and it’s none of your business!”  
  
“Lord Ampora is your patron?”  
  
“No, his neighbor.”  
  
“I see!”  
  
“You got funny eyes, lady,” Delmus says resentfully, hauling on her hands to get her claws free of his face. He doesn’t get far. Violet is stronger than teal, sure, but only full grown, and Delmus is a pre-adolescent hanging off the arm of a teal on the front of the bell curve of puberty. A barge could run into her hull-first and come off the worse.    
  
“That I do, due to a very funny story that I have absolutely no wish to share with a street urchin,” Terezi says with an unpleasant smile. She knows that her teeth are longer and sharper than usual; her face is longer and sharper than usual. Her hair would no doubt continue that trend, if she hadn’t hacked it off at the roots this evening with scissors stolen from the barber downstairs.  
  
“Can I go now?” Delmus demands, flaring his bitty fins out. Terezi paps him on the cheek with a maternal little chirp like she heard on an extremely weird human-fronted porno and takes her hand off his forehead. He cannonballs into Lilyat’s. Terezi sits on the curb opposite, arms crossed on her knees, and waits. She’s nowhere else to be, completely new in town, with fifteen cee in her pocket and a coastal plains accent thick enough to chew on.  
  
There’s no end of trolls to watch. This is a busy part of town, where most of the market is located, and since adult trolls congregate in urban areas, she’s never seen very many. It’s a very strange experience. A very pretty rustblood getting on in years smiles at her as she passes. That’s another first for the night.  
  
Delmus Ishaan reappears before midnight, with a very shabby looking indigo not far behind him. Delmus doesn’t even look around him before he comes out the door, apparently secure in his caste to protect him. Terezi doesn’t have to tell him what a terrible mistake that is; he learns for himself when the indigo clamps a hand down on his shoulder.  
  
She’s got her cane up and ready, but waits. The indigo’s hand starts to creep while he’s talking, and Delmus whips round, but he’s too young for a strife specibus, and his puny coldblood fists bounce harmlessly off the indigo’s hip. Terezi takes no action until the indigo is about to put teeth to neck, which she knows from experience is not pleasant at that age.  
  
“Hoy!” she calls, her accent catching the indigo’s attention, and she catches him across the neck with her blade on the upswing and across the back on the downswing. It’s not fatal, with the way coldbloods congeal round the edges, but it gets him down long enough for her to scoop up Delmus and take to the alleys. Being unusually tall and long-legged for her caste puts her on par with the indigo, and she outpaces him in a moment. Delmus is badly startled, but not hurt or afraid, and he gives her directions to a cafe a mile or two away. She pays for coffee; he’s only a kid.  
  
“There are many paths an event can take!” she tells Delmus. “I could not have predicted which one that would take. An idea is not enough to do with, if you wish to act in a fair and balanced manner!”  
  
“I coulda got him out,” Delmus says, making a face at the taste of coffee. It’s good, with the weird sea salt tang she’s come to expect from southern brands. “This is gross, why did you get it for me. I want chocolate.”  
  
“Too bad, it’s my reward for preventing you from becoming that indigo’s chocolate!”  
  
An older troll would either have made a disgusted noise or laughed. Delmus looks at her flatly in a way that says he doesn’t get it and doesn’t care to.  
  
“Besides, chocolate will rot your lovely little dentals,” she continues, hitching up the side of her mouth to fit a straw between her lip and gums. If she’s careful, it’ll stay in place and not get shredded to shit by her teeth. “Professional work, if I were to hazard a guess. But that would not be a surprise! You are a liberti. What is your patron’s lusus?”  
  
“Cholerbear,” Delmus says sullenly, slumping back in his seat. “I’d rather be get over-handled by a ‘jugglator than interrogated by a crazy lady, y’know.”  
  
“I’m quite sure of it. I will allow you to return to your den of iniquity and decadence in just a moment!”  
  
Delmus makes a hilariously overwrought noise.  
  
“I have only one more question. Are you capable of getting your hands on an identification card that would pass muster in a human city?”  
  
Delmus looks absolutely dull-eyed. She imagines he has absolutely no idea of the real condition of Skaia, these nights. Libertii wouldn’t. They’re only coddled little pets, after all.  
  
“Prolly,” he concedes after a minute. “You’d have to talk to my patron, though.”  
  
“Very well! Take me to your hive, miniaturized horror, and we will navigate the minefields of interpersonal communication.”  
  
The walk seems even longer than it is, what with Delmus making retching noises every other step, to keep up the image of miniaturized horror. Terezi has never regretted saying something quite so much.  
  
Delmus’ patron is not unpleasant, but clearly wants midblood filth out of his hive, and he gets her printed an I.D. within an hour. It’s actually official, the kind that comes from registering with the census. She hadn’t known you could do that. She’s on the train west by dawn, with nothing but the clothes on her back and her cane held up like a battering ram. It’s a full two week trip, skirting the human encampments on Heat Coast and the desert, but come one afternoon they pull into the station just outside Consequence City.  
  
Off the train is a platform, guards in red at each corner, and down the wide stairs is a tunnel and gates. She goes through one gate, shuts it, waits for the next to open, waits for it to shut. It’s a poor man’s decontamination lock, until the thirty second bleach sweep and the ten second soaking. She stands in the little customs parlor gasping and dripping.  
  
Terezi sweeps back her hair, just beginning to reach her ears, and clears her eyes so the cybernetics can dry themselves. A guard hands her a dry shirt with an apologetic look, and she strips down to put it on without a second thought.  
  
“You’ve the flattest chest I’ve ever seen,” a woman says while they’re waiting for their identification to clear. Terezi takes a minute to identify the language and switch gears; it wasn’t necessary to learn, really, but a balanced judgement can never come from one perspective, and no education is complete if there are other languages to learn and one doesn’t bother with more than their native language. It’s just irresponsible behavior.  
  
“You’ve the bulgiest,” Terezi says, hoping she’s understandable but gamely plowing on anyway. “What are those for, anyway? Why do you have three, and why is the third the largest?”  
  
“Because it’s not a breast, it’s a baby,” the woman says, amused instead of annoyed. “Malinda Premo.”  
  
“Terezi Pyrope,” Terezi says. “What’s a baby? How many are there?”  
  
“Just one.”  
  
“Are they tasty?”  
  
“I don’t believe so.”  
  
“Ah. What a waste of resources.”  
  
“I..suppose.”  
  
The customs man comes then, announcing that they’re all of them all set, even the troll national lurking in the corner. Thus Terezi is loosed on a strange city with no job and no hope of staying without one, at least until she hears one of the bearded men in purple suits talking about the lack of a quartermaster. Without the faintest idea what that is, she wanders towards the Wall, where she is ushered into a lovely sitting room in the middle.  
  
She likes it already, the thick carpets and cheerful faces.  
  
Malinda Premo is there again, and another man and a woman. Neither of the others have the large third breast. Terezi wonders what that’s all about. They go in, one by one, and come out, one by one, until it’s only Terezi. She sits on the carpet after that, since it’s unlikely she’ll sit on so nice a carpet ever again if she doesn’t get the job.  
  
The soldier comes out for the second time, although Terezi hadn’t paid her much attention the first time. The soldier is-well, she’s really bizarre looking, and Terezi briefly feels guilty for such a biased reaction. Her nose has a proper neat curve to it, and her eyes are wide and dark red, but her pupils are absolutely enormous. Terezi sees the sharp, hard cheekbones and jumbled teeth, collates the evidence, and concludes dual heritage.  
  
“This is embarrassing but-how do you pronounce this?” the soldier asks, presumably indicating the name on her board.  
  
“It is not hard!” she says, chirping in an extremely friendly manner.  
  
“I know I look like I-I’m monolingual, alright, can you speak English? That’s kind of going to be important here.”  
  
“Apologies! It’s only fair to speak to you in your own language. I saw your eyes and concluded more than one national heritage.” Terezi says in English, although mildly annoyed by the amount of English she’s had to use today. Humans are so racist.  
  
“Yeah,” the soldier sighs, “that’s a common reaction to the, uh, red eyes and everything.”  
  
“No horns?”  
  
“No, thank god.”  
  
“Only I’ve seen some like you that did. Cute little nubs, mostly.”  
  
There were a few of them outside. Terezi pictures the children against the face in front of her and shrugs. Perhaps hybrids are more variable than predicted.  
  
“Yeah, not even a keratin patch. How’s your name pronounced?”  
  
“I don’t know how to use your letters,” Terezi says pleasantly. “My education was somewhat lacking when it comes to your delightful country.”  
  
“Oh, that’s just-well, that’s great.”  
  
Terezi shrugs cheerfully and says her name. The soldier is obviously trying her best when she repeats it back, but her accent is absolutely atrocious, with the duller vowels of English.  
  
“Terezi Pyrope?”  
  
“There’s not a long e sound at the end, coffeecake,” Terezi says placidly. The soldier’s hair has a distinctly coffee kind of smell to it.  
  
“Your file says you’re trained in law.”  
  
“I need a job to be able to stay in the city.”  
  
“Why are you in the city?”  
  
“Not a lot of trolls want to be in Skaia right now.”  
  
“Alright, yeah, I don’t blame anyone for that.”  
  
Terezi is hired with a handshake and a promise to be uniformed by dinner. She meets the Captain and is immediately enamored of the Captain’s brusque, frankly-kind-of-weary efficiency. The Captain’s eyes are very purple! This is quite a revelation. Terezi had been of the opinion that human eyes were limited to a two-range spectrum: brown as lusus shit or blue as murder. The Captain has a distinct stink of copper and limes that stuffs up Terezi’s nasals to the point where her cybernetics go wonky. It makes vision very frustrating.  
  
“Mayday!” Terezi says, sitting down at one of the trestle tables in the mess. “I am feeling so sharp in this uniform that I may put out an ocular bulb.”  
  
“The fuck’s it saying?”  
  
Mekhit Nawn, who had taken a full three hours to identify herself and only as a bemused afterthought, props her chin on her hand and rips off a bite of bread with her pointy jumbled teeth. Terezi wonders if she’s ever been to a dentafflictor, and if so, whether they had just gone at her gums with a bone saw.  
  
“I think it’s an eye, Ronan.”  
  
“I’m not an it,” Terezi points out with what she feels is admirable patience. “I understand that you may have trouble grasping Alternian sexual dimorphism, given your pitiable lack of both biological knowledge and practical application of standardized education modules! You certainly cannot smell my pheromones, and you certainly cannot tell that my extremely dominant behavior marks  me as a female!”  
  
“What the fuck,” Ronan says. “I am so fucking done with aliens.”  
  
“We are not aliens if we have been here as long as you have been sapient.”  
  
“You are absolutely aliens.”  
  
“Wait,” another one of the humans says. “I get that you aren’t people or anything, but why don’t you have boobs?”  
  
“Does that mean Captor’s a chick?” another one hisses. Terezi elects to ignore that entirely.  
  
“This is the second time I have encountered that word today,” Terezi says to Mekhit, making an annoyed _beerk_ ing noise. “I am absolutely a person. I do not have your boobs because I am not a human. I am an Alternian. I understand that you are dense down to the molecular level and therefore I will make allowances for your human-centric ignorance.”  
  
“You’re all being so fucking racist, and it’s not like you’ve never seen a troll before,” Mekhit scolds the other humans. “Oughta be fucking ashamed of yourselves. None of you would talk to Captor like that. She’s got a sword in that cane, you know, if she took it to Ronan’s neck I wouldn’t stop her. Go ahead, Pyrope, I bet it’ll make you feel better.”

Terezi considers it briefly, but settles for snarling at Ronan so hard that he falls off the bench with a shriek. Humans respond very satisfactorily to dominance displays.  
  
“Mekhit, don’t give yourself a fit.”  
  
“Shut up, An Yan.”  
  
The An Yan human tucks the corner of her mouth in. Terezi is beginning to regret being so flip with her information; presumably this Captor is difficult to pry.  
  
“Alright, this is likely as ignorant a question as you’ll hear from anyone, including these idiots,” An Yan says, “but I need to ask. Call it human curiosity. If lady trolls don’t have boobs, like we seen from this one and the Empress and all of them, then how come you’ve got such big tits, Mekhit?”  
  
“ _Are you fucking kidding me_ ,” Mekhit spits, immediately flushed and hostile.  
  
“Nah. Completely serious. Gotta know.”  
  
“My dad had a mother, you fuck!”  
  
“So Grammie Nawn had them knockers? I swear I’ve never seen anything like it.”  
  
“Alright, we are done here, good fucking bye!” Mekhit says, getting up with her teeth bared. She vanishes through the wall. It’s kind of weird, and the noise is unbelievable.  
  
“I find you all regrettably difficult to tell apart,” Terezi says as she stands and pokes her cane against the floor. “But I will be sure to remember all of you if the time ever comes to burn your bodies in respect. You can be assured it will not happen.”  
  
It’s not as much of a burn as she’d like it to be. She guesses humans show as much respect to their dead as they do to immigrants.  
  
She follows the faint smell of pastry down the ramps, partly to get a feel for the layout and partly because she has nothing other to do than track Mekhit Nawn down and demand retribution. She doubts humans engage in ritual battle, and anyway Terezi’s never had the chance to do a real ritual battle, so it’s probably for the better that Mekhit immediately whips a chestnut at her forehead. Terezi is startled out of her mild blood rage by the thunk of the nut on the floor, and tilts her face down to look at it, cheeks puffed out.  
  
“What’s that?” she asks after a moment, completely derailed.  
  
“It’s a nut.”  
  
“What’s a nut?”  
  
“A kind of food. Crack it open and eat the inside. Here.”  
  
This time she catches the chestnut. She watches Mekhit crack it open, then warily slots the edges between her teeth and snaps her jaw shut.  
  
The shell pieces taste horrendous. The inside tastes horrendous.  
  
“Tell me this is not some kind of harbinger,” Terezi says, feeling desperately vulnerable. She wants her lusus, but Ascension is almost a half sweep past. “I would very much rather not hate it here.”  
  
“You’ll be fine,” Mekhit says, tucking the corner of her mouth and watching Terezi speculatively. “I really wouldn’t be worried. They’ll adjust. They adjusted to Captor, anyway.”  
  
“Not to you?”  
  
“Ah, well, I’ve been here my whole life.”  
  
“I see. What is it like?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“To grow up among others of your-your kind. I have been alone for a very long time!”  
  
“Oh, yeah, I can see how this would get weird for you. It’s not terrible. It’s not great. I dunno, Pyrope. Humans are very communal, but we’re not,” Mekhit says with a shrug. “Don’t know what to tell you other than that the wallmen come round to everything eventually and it’s gonna suck until they get used to you.”  
  
“That,” Terezi says, “is the story of my life.”  
  
“Ain’t it always,” Mekhit says ruefully, cracking another chestnut open. “Want to go see a movie? I’ve got my half today and you don’t start until tomorrow, so. I mean, the New Years' stuff isn't until tonight.”  
  
“What’s a movie?”  
  
“Wow, really?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“It’s like a bunch of moving pictures, I dunno. Bet you’ll like it. Can your eyes pick up images well enough, though?”  
  
“My eyes are the best of their kind,” Terezi says smugly. “They were made by an itinerant tinker with wonderful handwriting.”  
  
“Huh. Don’t say.”  
  
The movie is extremely enjoyable, as predicted.


End file.
